What about the rest of the family? How did they survive?”

“I remember brimming with questions and curiosities. “It was shocking certainly, but not in any negative sort of way,” Hunter says. She had become one quarter Polish Jew and granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. Suddenly, talking to her grandmother, Hunter herself had acquired a new identity.

He was writing songs in Paris in the spring of 1939 and reached Rio by a circuitous, risky route that included long stops in Africa. Her grandmother, from South Carolina, had met her grandfather in Rio de Janeiro late in the war. But she did not learn that he had eluded Nazi capture or even that he was Jewish until shortly after his death when she interviewed her grandmother for a school ancestry project. Growing up in Attleboro, Mass., she knew her grandfather, who had changed his name from Addy Kurc to Eddy Court, as a composer and engineer turned businessman. Up to that point Hunter had only a sketchy understanding of the siblings’ experience. It was, this is what I had to do to survive.” “She spoke in a very black-and-white manner. I took a very gentle approach with her,” Hunter says of their meeting. When Hunter began her research travels in earnest in 2008, she made Paris a first stop. Now 80, Felicia lives in Paris, married to the owner of a lingerie company. The most harrowing (and mini-series ready) story belongs to a child, Felicia, who is five months old when the novel begins in March 1939.īy war’s end she will have hidden in a sack of rags, waited trustingly while her mother dug their graves at a mass execution site, kept silent under a table watching the blood drain from a summarily executed hideaway, been dropped from a second-story window stuffed in a straw mattress and buried in the rubble of a bombed convent.

Most acquire forged identification papers and fear being exposed as Jews. Another is deported to a Siberian labor camp, then fights with the Polish army in the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. One of the siblings (the family name is Kurc) risks drowning in a freezing river. But the paths they took spanned five continents.”Īll lived under the threat of death and in the proximity of death, however. Readers may think, “Oh, a Polish Holocaust story. “That’s the wow factor of the book,” she says.

Author of we were the lucky ones